¹ For the most important studies of allegory in opera in this period, see Price, Curtis A., ‘Political Allegory in Late-Seventeenth-Century English Opera’, Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of Winton Dean, ed. Fortune, Nigel (Cambridge, 1987), 1–29,Google Scholar and Walkling, Andrew R., ‘Court, Culture, and Politics in Restoration England: Charles II, James II, and the Performance of Baroque Monarchy’, Ph.D. diss. (Cornell University, 1997).Google Scholar I am indebted to Dr Walkling for making a draft copy available to me some time ago. The gist of Walkling's approach - insistence on authorially designed covert allegory not explicidy present in the text and not confirmed by contemporary contextual evidence - is clearly stated in his ‘Performance and Political Allegory in Restoration England: What to Interpret and When’, in Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, ed. Burden, Michael (Oxford, 1996), 161–79.Google Scholar Virtually all modern commentators have taken ‘politics’ to mean references to kings, princes, and affairs of state. Obviously such allusions may be celebratory or critical, direct or covert. Where concealed allusion has been claimed, ‘allegory’ (in a general sense) has usually been seen as the vehicle.

² For a lucid survey, see Brown, Howard Mayer's account in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols., ed. Sadie, Stanley (London, 1992), III, 671–5.Google Scholar

³ [Blount, Thomas], Glossographia: or a Dictionary (London: Tho. Newcombe for Humphrey Moseley and George Sawbridge, 1656).Google Scholar

⁴ Handel and the Pastoral Tradition (Oxford, 1980), 112.Google Scholar

⁵ One of the few demonstrable cases is King Arthur, where Purcell declined to set songs Dryden wrote for the scene in which Emmeline recovers her sight, and set ‘Sound a parley, ye fair’ (designed for Cupid) as a duet for Cupid and the Frost Genius.Google Scholar

⁶ A few titles have been omitted for a variety of reasons. Little is known about ‘The Queen's Masque’, performed at court in 1671, or the Ballet et Musique given there in 1674. Duffett's and Bannister's Beauties Triumph (1676) may have been performed only at a girls' boarding school. A Parley of Instruments (concert performance, 1676) and Grabu's Pastorelle (given at court in 1684) remain largely mysterious.Google Scholar

⁷ The Restoration Court Stage (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), 177.Google Scholar

⁸ See Cannan, Paul D., ‘New Directions in Serious Drama on the London Stage, 1675–1678’, Philological Quarterly, 73 (1994), 219–42.Google Scholar

⁹ Vice Chamberlain Coke's Theatrical Papers, 1706–1715, ed. Milhous, Judith and Hume, Robert D. (Carbondale, 1982), 15 (letter of 9 December 1706).Google Scholar

¹⁰ The phrase is used, for example, on the title page of The Island Princess (pub. 1699).Google Scholar

¹¹ See, for example, his diary entries for 7 and 11 September 1661.Google Scholar

¹² Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Milhous, Judith and Hume, Robert D. (London, 1987), 71, 73, 75, 77, 80.Google Scholar

¹³ The sparseness of new offerings in the public theatre between 1677 and 1690 was a result of exclusion crisis uproar, diminished competition after the theatrical union of 1682, and the staggering losses suffered when the run of Albion and Albanius was cut short by Monmouth's invasion in 1685.Google Scholar

¹⁴ ‘Scenes, Machines, and empty Opera's reign’, as Dryden says grumpily in his prologue for the opening of the King's Company's ‘Plain Built House’.Google Scholar

¹⁵ For discussion of the difference between the two theatres, see Hume, , ‘The Nature of the Dorset Garden Theatre’, Theatre Notebook, 36 (1982), 99–109.Google Scholar

¹⁶ ‘Exotick but Rational Entertainments: The English Dramatick Operas’, English Drama: Forms and Development, ed. Axton, Marie and Williams, Raymond (Cambridge, 1977), 133.Google Scholar

¹⁷ See Milhous, Judith, ‘The Multi-Media Spectacular on the Restoration Stage’, British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800, ed. Kenny, Shirley Strum (Washington, 1984), 41–66,Google Scholar and Opera Finances in London, 1674–1738’, Journal of the American Muskologkal Society, 37 (1984), 567–92.Google Scholar For a musicological (as opposed to financial) perspective on the specialness of the Dorset Garden operas, see Holman, Peter, Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993), chapters 14 and 15.Google Scholar

¹⁸ But Hark! More Harmony: The Libretti of Restoration Opera in English (Ypsilanti, 1971), 145.Google Scholar

¹⁹ See Milhous, Judith, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1695–1708 (Carbondale, 1979).Google Scholar

²⁰ I have analysed these works in ‘Opera in London, 1695–1706’, British Theatre and the Other Arts (see n. 17), 67–91.Google Scholar

²¹ ‘Production, Consumption and Political Function of Seventeenth-Century Opera’, Early Musk History, 4 (Cambridge, 1984), 209–96.Google Scholar

²² Zaslaw, Neal, ‘The First Opera in Paris: A Study in the Politics of Art’, Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque, ed. Heyer, John Hajdu (Cambridge, 1989), 7–23, esp. 19–20.Google Scholar

²³ Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, 1973), particularly chapters 3–5.Google Scholar

²⁴ Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).Google Scholar

²⁵ Bevington, 25.Google Scholar

²⁶ Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar

²⁷ Calendar ofState Papers, Venetian, 1619–1621, 111. The play is lost. On this episode, see Finkelpearl, Philip J., ‘ “The Comedians' Liberty”: Censorship of the Jacobean Stage Reconsidered’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 123–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁸ Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City, 1991).Google Scholar

²⁹ For the fullest and best survey, see Randall, Dale B. J.'s Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington, 1995).Google Scholar

³⁰ Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 209–10.Google Scholar

³¹ For an account of indirect commentary in non-dramatic genres, see Patterson, Annabel, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, 2nd edn (orig. 1984; Madison, [1990]).Google Scholar

³² See, for example, Chibnall, Jennifer, ‘ “To that secure fix'd state”: The Function of the Caroline Masque Form’, in The Court Masque, ed. Lindley, David (Manchester, 1984), 78–93.Google Scholar

³³ See, for example, ‘Politics and the Masque: The Triumph of Peace’, The Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 117–41;Google Scholar‘Politics and the Masque: Salmacida Spolia’, in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Healy, Thomas and Sawday, Jonathan (Cambridge, 1990), 59–74;Google Scholar‘Ben Jonson's Pan's Anniversary and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral’, English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), 369–404; and the pieces cited in notes 36 and 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴ ‘Some Musical Aspects of the English Court Masque’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1/3 (1948), 3–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁵ Criticism and Compliment. The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, 1987).Google Scholar

³⁶ See particularly Butler, Martin, ‘Early Stuart Court Culture: Compliment or Criticism?’ The Historical Journal, 32 (1989), 425–35;CrossRefGoogle Scholar‘Reform or Reverence? T h e Politics of the Caroline Masque’, Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts, ed. Mulryne, J. R. and Shewring, Margaret (Cambridge, 1993), 118–56.Google Scholar

³⁷ Jonson's Gypsies Unmasqued (Durham, NC, 1975).Google Scholar

³⁸ ‘ “We are one mans all”: Jonson's The Gipsies Metamorphosed’, Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991), 253–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁹ Zwicker, Stephen N., Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, 1993)Google Scholar and Bywaters, David, Dryden in Revolutionary England (Berkeley, 1991),Google Scholar are among those most inclined to believe in very specific connectives. Maguire, Nancy Klein's Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge, 1992), argues persuasively that the heroic play is a direct descendant of the court masque and finds political agendas virtually omnipresent in 1660s plays - but claims no more than obvious personations and direct connectives.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Owen, Susan J., ‘Interpreting the Politics of Restoration Drama’, The Seventeenth Century, 8 (1993), 67–97,Google Scholarand Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford, 1996).Google Scholar

⁴¹ ‘Politcal Interpretations of Venice Preserv'd’, Modem Philology, 85 (1988), 345–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴² See particularly Wallace's classic articles on the subject,‘Dryden and History: A Problem in Allegorical Reading’, English Literary History, 36 (1969), 265–90,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and‘ “Examples Are Best Precepts”: Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Poetry’, Critical Inquiry, 1 (1974), 273–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴³ See Patterson, Annabel, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, NC, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁴ The authors' dedication piously denies that the play was either ‘a Libel’ or ‘a Parallel of particular Persons’. Perhaps not, but such specificity was totally unnecessary. The prologue starts with an announcement: ‘Our Play's a Parallel’, and in the context of 1682 the village idiot would have understood that this was a Tory homily about the dangers presented by rebellious young dukes. The fury with which Whig pamphleteers denounced the play shows that it was understood. Apparendy it was so fiercely resented because it was perceived as an exercise in character parallel, not merely a plot pattern. For the best political analysis, see Harth, Phillip, Pen for a Party: Dryden's Tory Propaganda in Its Contexts (Princeton, 1993), esp. 188–205.Google Scholar For an excellent account of the ‘application’ principles involved, see Roper, Alan, ‘Drawing Parallels and Making Applications in Restoration literature’, Politics as Reflected in Literature (Los Angeles, 1989), 29–65. Roper's essay is the best attempt to date to extend our understanding of the kind of seventeenth-century reading described by J o hn Wallace.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ I have analysed the problems of such validation at length in ‘Content and Meaning in the Drama’, chapter 1 of The Rakish Stage (Carbondale, 1983).Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Spence, Joseph, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, 2 vols., ed. Osborn, James M. (Oxford, 1966), II, 638.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ I have discussed the differences in establishing political interpretations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728–1737 (Oxford, 1988), 77–9.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ ‘Otway's Caius Marius and the Exclusion Crisis’, Modem Philology, 85 (1988), 363–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁹ For a contemporary description of the episode, see The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 1, 1660–1700, ed. Lennep, William Van, Avery, Emmett L. and Scouten, Arthur H. (Carbondale, 1965), 371.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Public Record Office LC 5/147, p. 239 (order of 8 December 1686).Google Scholar

⁵¹ A play stressing the wisdom of entrusting the future of the country to ex-general George Washington is unlikely to make me ponder the wisdom of voting for a current military hero - but might have precisely that effect on a different member of the audience.Google Scholar

⁵² Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/24 (Cambridge, 1986), Introduction and 14.Google Scholar

⁵³ Goldberg, Jonathan, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, 1983), 232 (a term used in a discussion of approaches to Measure for Measure).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ ‘Personification vs. Allegory’, Enlightening Allegory, ed. Cope, Kevin L. (New York, 1993), 21–39, esp. 22. Maresca elaborates the point originally made by Rosemond Tuve - that ‘personification and allegory are not the same thing’, but virtually all students of opera have ignored this distinction and I have not tried to fight that battle here. For a brief overview of allegory in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European opera, see die article on ‘allegory’ by Curtis Price in Opera Grove, I, 89–90.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964; rpt. Ithaca, 1970), 7.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Dryden says in his preface that ‘The Subject of it is wholly Allegorical; and the Allegory it self [is] so very obvious, that it will n o sooner be read than understood.’ The Works ojJohn Dryden, vol. XV, ed. Miner, Earl and GufTey, George R. (Berkeley, 1976), 11.Google ScholarGerard Langbaine quotes and endorses this passage in An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford: L.L. for George West and Henry Clements, 1691), 152.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ For the picture and analysis of the duck/rabbit, see Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960; 2nd rev. edn, Princeton, 1972), 5,Google Scholar and Edwards, Betty, Drawing on the Artist Within (New York, 1986), 173.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ If, for example, the interpreter has decided that Dryden's King Arthur ‘is’ James II, and that Oswald ‘is’ William III, one should not totally evade the difficulty posed by the fact that, historically speaking, James did not defeat William. The allegorical interpreter may declare this an instance of ‘wish fulfilment’; the reader is then entitled to decide how plausible or satisfying this explanation seems.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Don Sebastian was revived occasionally into the 1750s and performed as late as 1794. King Arthur was the smash hit of the season at Goodman's Fields in 1735–6 and continued to play with success into the 1780s.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Price, ‘Political Allegory’, esp. 4–5.Google Scholar

⁶¹ The date of Part 2 is undeterminable.Google Scholar

⁶² Andrew Walkling objects (personal letter, 19 November 1994) that ‘if Davenant did intend it, he would want to maintain just enough ambiguity to make the Puritans doubt that it really was authorial … This is fundamental to an understanding of how “functional ambiguity” works’. I would reply that where a meaning must depend entirely on reader or audience application, the interpreter should be content with that, and not attempt to practise mind-reading on the author.Google Scholar

⁶³ ‘Dido and Aeneas: Questions of Style and Evidence’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 115–25.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Ariane, Psyche, Albion and Albanius, The Grove and The British Enchanters. Price offers allegorical readings of none of the masques in Table 2.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ See Bashford, Christina, ‘Perrin and Cambert's “Ariane, ou le marriage de Bacchus” Re-examined’, Music and Letters, 72 (1991), 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁶ For the best analysis to date, see Hammond, Paul, ‘Dryden's Albion and Albanius: The Apotheosis of Charles II’, in The Court Masque, ed. Lindley, , 169–83.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ The automatic identification of protagonist and reigning monarch is one of the fundamental assumptions in John Buttrey's oft-cited but unpublished Cambridge dissertation of 1967, ‘The Evolution of English Opera between 1656 and 1695: A Re-investigation.’ This view has proved surprisingly influential but has never yet been systematically reconsidered.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Price (‘Political Allegory’, 9) calls this ‘Shadwell's covert message’, but I think the term poorly chosen. There is nothing subversive or anti-royalist here; Shadwell's message could legitimately be called ‘indirect’, but it seems quite open.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, 1984), 270–1.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ For a caustic (and in my opinion accurate) account of the job of adaptation, see Pinnock, Andrew, ‘Play into Opera: Purcell's The Indian Queen’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷¹ See Price, ‘Political Allegory’, 25–8.Google Scholar

⁷² See note 1, above.Google Scholar

⁷³ See Pinnock, Andrew, ‘ “Unscarr'd by turning times”? The Dating of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music, 20 (1992), 373–90,Google Scholar and Price, ‘Dido and Aeneas: Questions of Style and Evidence’. Wood and Pinnock argue for a date c. 1684 on stylistic evidence; Price demolishes the stylistic argument and prudendy refuses to speculate about the date without additional evidence. Price's argument is a model of rigorous logic and careful use of historical evidence. Walkling, Andrew R. has added further objections in ‘ “The Dating of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas?”: A Reply to Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 469–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁴ The Works of John Dryden, ed. Scott, Walter, vol. VIII (London and Edinburgh, 1808), 111.Google Scholar For largely non-political readings, see particularly Altieri, Joanne, ‘Baroque Hieroglyphics: Dryden's King Arthur’, Philological Quarterly, 61 (1982), 431–51;Google ScholarCharlton, David, ‘ ’King Arthur”: Dramatick Opera’, Music and Letters, 64 (1983), 183–92;CrossRefGoogle ScholarArmistead, J. M., ‘Dryden's King Arthur and the Literary Tradition: A Way of Seeing’, Studies in Philology, 85 (1988), 53–72.Google Scholar For divided readings, see Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage, Chapter 7; Price, ‘Political Allegory’, 10–17; and Winn, James Anderson, John Dryden and His World (New Haven, 1987), 448–52. For a Jacobite reading, see David Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England, 75–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁵ Henry Purcell and the London Stage, 292–5.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ John Dryden and His World, 448–9. Winn supplies an extended analysis in ‘When Beauty Fires the Blood’: Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden (Ann Arbor, 1992), 273–302, in which he expresses his belief ‘that Dryden revised by turning specifically partisan allegory into something much more thoughtful: at its best, King Arthur asks probing questions about the links between sex and power in Dryden's world’ (275).Google Scholar

⁷⁷ ‘English Traditions in Handel's Rinaldo’, Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. Sadie, Stanley and Hicks, Anthony (London, 1987), 125. Price makes a very convincing argument for the possibilities of both Hanoverian and Stuart readings of an Italian opera on a classical subject.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Zaslaw, 19.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ ‘Political Allegory’, 28.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Many friends have generously given me helpful comments, corrections, suggestions and objections. I want to express my particular gratitude to Paul D. Carman, Jackson I. Cope, Don-John Dugas, Phillip Harth, John T. Harwood, Kit Hume, Matthew J. Kinservik, Lowell Lindgren, Nancy Klein Maguire, Judith Milhous, C. A. Prettiman, Curtis Price, Alan Roper, Amy Elizabeth Smith, Richard Strier, Andrew R. Walkling and James Anderson Winn. I dedicate this essay to the memory of John M. Wallace, whose work on seventeenth-century ‘allegorical’ reading remains fundamental to the field.Google Scholar